The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (20 page)

"What do you know about them?"

"Nothing. Just the rumors. But it was a joke. Nobody believed it except the people who believed in ghosts, alien abductions, the Illuminati."

My hope receded. "How did it end?"

"It wasn't all a lie," she said, voice going distant as she returned to her memories of the faraway view she must have had from whatever orbit-borne ship or capsule had exempted her from extinction. "They all fell asleep. They didn't wake up. It happened so fast."

"Why? Who did it?"

"I don't know."

"What else?" Vette said. "What was happening right before this?"

"Nothing. Nothing that would spur a war. It had to be an accident. A madman." The woman looked up from the floor, eyes bright and sharp. "If you're from the future, why don't you know this? Isn't this your history, too?"

I shook my head. "I can't say anything more."

"But it isn't always like this, is it? So silent. So empty. If you're here, that means it has to get better."

"It will," I said. "I promise."

We left her in the subway car she'd turned into her home. Neither I nor Vette spoke until we'd walked clean out of the decaying city.

"We should have taken her with us," Vette said.

"We can't. We shouldn't be here in the first place."

"Neither should she. She survived because of a fluke. Sounds like kismet."

The ocean gleamed to the west. I took the offramp from the highway and the waters sank from view. "Or random, meaningless chance."

Vette kicked a chunk of cracked asphalt down the road. "Well, the apocalypse wasn't. The whole world doesn't just fall asleep. Whoever created that little virobot designed it that way."

"Probably."

"Which means they
wanted
to end the world."

"Or to have the ability to end it. There's a difference."

She shifted her pack on her shoulders. Her wounds had healed, but I suspected there may have been pellets left in her muscles. At least they were steel, not lead.

"This hadn't happened the first time we visited this world," she said. "If G&A really has time travel, they could have undone this. They didn't, thus they wanted it to happen. QED."

"That is genuinely convincing," I said.

"You're surprised I can be convincing?"

"I'm surprised I can be convinced."

It was a good theory, but without proof, it remained just that. Back at the house, we spent the next months expanding the garden, digging irrigation canals down to the stream and scavenging hand pumps and hoses to distribute water to the crops. I started tinkering with solar panels, hoping to automate pumps and sprinklers, maybe find a tractor.

My tablet had had plenty of time to build the software necessary to watch the movies I'd copied from Horizon Studios. After the day's work, we watched them together on the couch, comedies and dramas, planet-hopping sci-fi and historical epics. When my muscles were sore and my mind was exhausted, it was good to get lost in these stories, to be taken away from my own life.

Now that I knew its people were truly dead and gone, we visited Brownville more often, both to harvest supplies and to search for more clues. There was an abundance of the former and too few of the latter. What we saw matched the woman's story. Most people had dropped in the middle of their daily lives. Corpses lay facedown in their cereal bowls. At the wheels of cars. Behind service counters, their customers collapsed on the other side. Just a few had tried to flee or hide. For most, they'd fallen asleep without knowing they'd never wake up.

Vette and I remained together. Two years in, we began to fight—I can't remember now what caused it—and I thought we might break apart and live out separate lives. But things calmed down by themselves. We worked side by side, slept together, smiled at each other each morning. If we'd had other options for partners, maybe the cracks would have widened too far to heal, but I think we would have been fine no matter where we were. We were good together. She had a quick mind and was eager to solve problems. In the brief time we'd worked as CR together, her youthful silliness had annoyed me, but now that it was just us and the wind, I found it wonderful.

Days became years. With Vette's help, I got the irrigation automated, but it broke down regularly. Sometimes I wondered if it was more trouble than it was worth. Keeping ourselves fed and our house intact took constant effort. Many of my ambitions for improving the home had to be set aside. I never got a tractor running. Years of neglect and weather had broken the vehicles beyond my ability to repair.

After six years, my tablet quit working. I couldn't convince it back to life. But we'd stored our movies on Vette's tablet, too, and although we'd seen them all by now, we watched one each night until the day her device failed as well. After that, we read books aloud to each other, or told made-up stories of our own.

Do you know what it's like to be truly alone together? I doubt it. But it doesn't matter. We had it for ourselves, and that can't be taken away.

One day I found her on the porch gazing at the distant sea. She had a funny look on her face. I asked her what was the matter.

"Nothing," she said. "Just trying to remember what lobster tastes like."

"It was good, as I recall."

She smiled. "That's not helpful."

There wasn't anything to be done about it then and there—it was the middle of our spring growing season and any setbacks could make for a lean summer once the creek shrank—but I kept it in the back of my head. A couple months later, with one crop harvested and the next seeded but not yet sprouted, I got together our bags and took her down to the sea. I'd scavenged a few lobster traps, but after three days of surf and sun, they remained stubbornly empty. While Vette snoozed in the afternoon rays, I shuffled across the sand to a surf shop, grabbed flippers and a mask, and waded out to sea.

Call it beginner's luck, but within an hour of snorkeling, I swam back to shore with a bug in my hand. Vette woke as I was stoking up the fire. When she saw my catch, she laughed and clapped her hands.

I wish we'd had more days like that. But early on, it felt like we had to work too hard to ever leave the farm. Later, when I'd learned the plants could fend for themselves for a couple days and be none the worse for wear, we took more trips into the city, touring dusty museums and monuments, hiking up towers to watch the sunset, but I was already getting old. After years of hard labor, my knees weren't much for stairs. But Vette was always so happy to get away from our house on the hill, if just for a day, so I did the best I could.

We could have turned off our internal birth control. We talked about it many times. But it would have been too selfish. Anything we created would wind up erased when the Cutting Room came back for our young selves. At different points throughout the years, we both argued that it might be okay, that in a way it was no different from dying—wouldn't it be better to give our children existence even if that existence would later be negated?—but we never agreed on this at the same time. After a couple of decades, Vette's eggs stopped, and so did our discussions.

We had each other. That was enough.

She died first. She was 62. Much older than I ever thought we'd make it, but that didn't mean I was ready. One day she was healthy, the next she had a cough. Pneumonia. Near the end, I tried to give her antibiotics, but they were decades old, as useless as my reassurances, my prayers, my hands. She burned away from the inside. By the end, she no longer had the strength to cough.

But she found the strength to speak. She took my hand in hers. It trembled. "I'm so glad we got lost here."

She held my hand. She smiled. One last breath, a sleep-like, fading gasp, the sound of a body letting go of the world.

After all we'd made it through, I almost killed myself then, first with my pistol—I couldn't pull the trigger—and then through apathy. Toward the fields. My health. My very hunger. My stomach didn't care if nothing was inside it, so I didn't care to feed it.

After a few weeks, my appetite came back. It was months after that before my appetite for life began to hesitantly reappear, but in time my gloom burned away as surely as the June fogs. The balance of my sadness swung and I walked through the grassy hills with tears in my eyes, so grateful that we'd had so long together, that we had quite literally shared a world of our own.

It was a miracle, wasn't it? How strange it was that coincidence and causality had brought us together. Allowed us such a long and happy life. One that was caused by the death of billions, the end of this world's humans, but that wasn't our fault. We'd had to work with what we'd been given.

I was several years older than Vette. My knees weren't good and neither was my back. I think that's what killed me. I was down at the creek, fly fishing, and I must have slipped, because I can remember shouting out, and how cold the mountain-fed water felt on my chest, and how scared I was.

But then it goes dark. My next memory is white numbness. The touch of the Pods. Opening my eyes to Primetime.

My hands were smooth. Years ago, I'd lost the tip of my left ring finger chopping wood, but it was whole again. I remembered. We hadn't been stranded after all. The Pods had shown up just two weeks late, yanking us away from our shack on the G&A campus, bringing us here.

For a moment, both sets of memories coexisted in my head. My long togetherness with Vette, our lives ending in natural deaths. Or our swift rescue by the Pods. Both outcomes had been real, but the latter outcome was becoming
more
real; Mara had changed our pasts, and our previous life was washing away like a castle made of sand.

But you don't have to lose it. Memory is its own dimension, distinct from space and time. Your past may change, but your memory of that past has the power to persist, particularly when you've got the Pods to help you hang on to it. It's a choice. There in the white safety of the Pod's walls, I could feel my new history bulging in my brain, an expanding bubble that threatened to force my old memories out of my head.

I chose to remember.

The Pod opened. The light was so bright. Mara was there, her face as grave as the world I'd just left.

She touched my shoulder. "I'm so sorry."

I was still pretty confused. "What happened?"

"Something went wrong with the Pods."

"No shit."

"We're still looking into it. Look, for us, this was just a few minutes ago."

"I remember how it works." I followed her down the hall. At first I shuffled beside her, back bent with remembered pain, but then I straightened up a little and it was fine, so I arched my back and it was fine too, and I remembered how good it felt to be young. "Where's Vette?"

"She's with Lummings," Mara said.

Took me a minute to dredge up the name. The CR chronopsychologist. "Am I next?"

"If you want to be."

I nodded, then remembered something else. I fished inside my faux-leather jacket for the non-wireless memory chips. In one timeline, I'd bashed them out of their owners' skulls almost forty years ago. In another timeline, my new one, I'd extracted them less than a month ago, and there were still little bits of hair and bone clinging to the jacks.

"Here," I said, handing her the bag of memories. "We took these from G&A's people. I never had the know-how to plug them into my own machine."

Mara weighed the bag in her palm. "Are you okay?"

"G&A was behind it. I'm hoping the proof is in one of those chips."

"Why would they go back in time to lay the foundation for an empire, then destroy the whole thing a couple centuries later?"

"Maybe they accomplished what they came for. Or maybe they recognized we were with the Cutting Room in Old Brownville and engineered an apocalypse to cover their tracks."

Mara nodded, troubled. "Things have been moving fast here, too. Davies wants to speak to you."

"At Central? When?"

"As soon as you're ready. This is getting serious, Blake."

I gave her a sideways eye. "You don't say."

She looked sufficiently awkward, then got back to business. "We'll start cracking these chips. Should I let Davies know you're on your way?"

"Yeah." A memory worked its way through the confused sludge of my head. "Even if G&A wiped out the planet, the people running it wouldn't have killed themselves. They must have hatched out of the timeline. If you send someone back before the apocalypse and watch who jumps out—maybe go back to the Old West first, ID Silas Hockery and match him to whatever name he's using at G&A—that should help you track them offworld."

"You've put some thought into this." Mara laughed dryly. "Guess you had plenty of time, huh?"

I laughed through my nose. After what I'd been through, if anyone else had said that, I might have punched them.

I headed for the elevator—some technology is perfect from the moment it's conceived—and took it down to the first basement, which was just as bright and airy as everything else at the facility. Several zipcars hung suspended from the line built into the back wall. I climbed into the pod-like car. Buckles hugged me around the thighs, hips, and chest. I spoke my destination and the zipcar accelerated silently down the system of gridded tubes built into the floor of the city, the capsule swinging up and down to avoid other cars. I laughed out loud. After so many years with nothing but bicycles, carts, and my own two feet, it felt like magic.

Central was halfway across the city, but my ride didn't last long. The zipcar decelerated and emerged from the pristine tunnel into Central's equally pristine basement. It swerved off the mainline and popped its hatch.

The only entrance into the building led straight to security, a short, hollow tube. I stepped inside. The door sealed behind me, popping my ears. A team of machines dislodged from the wall to confirm my genetic identity and that I was carrying nothing dangerous or capable of taking recordings of any kind, meaning they had to disable the cameras in my retinas. This was quick and painless, however, and I was quickly allowed to the elevators, which lifted me 120-odd stories to Davies' level.